Earlier this week, I attended the Oracle Partner Network day in London. I got attend many interesting presentations, and learned a lot about what's going on in the Oracle world.

As it has been a long time since I've used Oracle, this morning I decided to install Oracle on my iBook G4 with 512mb RAM. Officially, Oracle on OS X is only supported on OS X Server, so I was prepared for this to be a bit of a challenge.

The Oracle 10g Installer

I spent the afternoon playing around with the Oracle setup and got it working in the end. While I was running the Oracle Database Configuration Assistant (DBCA), the virtual memory usage on my laptop peaked at over 15 gigabytes, and things were getting pretty slow at this point. Having a gigabyte or two of RAM would have helped a lot here.

Processes ordered by VSIZE, and VM size peaking at over 15gb.

I had to change some things in init*.ora to get the database working. Each of the things I changed was in response to an error message thatI got while running 'startup':

• ORA-00205: error in identifying controlfile, check alert log for more info
  To correct this, I set the correct paths in the CONTROL_FILES parameter
• ORA-01103: database name 'SANDY' in controlfile is not 'DEFAULT'
  To corret this, I set the DB_NAME parameter to the name
• ORA-00201: controlfile version 10.1.0.2.0 incompatible with ORACLE version 10.0.0.0.0
  To corret this, I set the COMPATIBLE initialization parameter to 10.1.0.3

Success: Oracle 10g running on Mac OS X Tiger